Calling the Iraq war a mistake, as do the Democrats, does not carry with it any horror, shame or even the slightest interest in the million Iraqi lives lost. It’s the very few, by comparison, American military lives lost that are worthy of attention and mourning. In American media, a million Iraqi, Afghani, or Vietnamese dead do not equal the weight of one American fallen in the occupation of these nations.
The only attention non-American deaths get is in the highly heralded insurgent, and suspected insurgent, body counts that include men and boys who join up to fight against the American occupation of their countries and are automatically labeled terrorists in U.S. military reports.
The world, watching satellite TV, notices that the general American public, indifferent to its government policies, nevertheless seems to enjoy hearing of the U.S. killing record and body counts in the many small nations its always heroic military invades.
There is zero interest in the suffering of the family members of 'foreigners' who die ‘in harms way' of U.S. military firepower.
With John Kerry recent acquiescing to today’s wars, it is both dismal and disheartening, even bizarre, to recall that young Kerry denouncing the U.S. war on Vietnam as an atrocity in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Muhammad Ali did not need to go to Vietnam to know it was wrong, and he has never changed his mind.
P.S. Maybe our ex-swiftboat commander John Kerry will not help Obama's campaign anymore than did the endorsement of Hilary Clinton by a Bob Kerrey, (no relation) exposed on 60 Minutes in 2001 as the Vietnam war decorated U.S. Navy Seal commander of a massacre of 17 girls, a baby and an old man - all "at the very least, sympathizers" with the enemy independence movement. On the other hand, Bob Kerrey still accepted as influential, being a former governor, senator, current President of the New School University in New York City, and member of the 9/11 Commission. See OpEdNews, Dec. 18, 2007:
Musician and writer, who has lived and worked on all the continents and whose articles on media have been published in China, Italy, England and the US, and now resides in New York City.
You're exactly right, & the point can't be emphasized enough
The officially-condoned US attitude towards our country's almost 3-decades-long atrocity in Vietnam speaks volumes about America's military madness. It's astonishing -- & very revealing -- that Americans are so conscious of the great crimes of the Nazis, while being almost entirely unaware that the second-greatest crime of the 20th century was probably the US aggression in Vietnam. (OK, one could perhaps argue that King Leopold in the Congo was worse, in the early years of that bloody century.)
There's no question that public standards of permissible political speech (such as Kerry's grotesque parading around as a "hero") and powerful shapers of culture such as Hollywood are key elements in keeping our population unable to perceive the crimes it commits.
As Chomsky & Herman have pointed out, Americans would immediately grasp the implications, if a German citizen was asked how many Jews were killed by the Third Reich, & the citizen guessed an absurdly low number like 50,000. Yet polls have shown that most Americans, whose armed forces slaughtered perhaps 3 million innocent Vietnamese from 1962-1975, are ignorant by a similar factor of how many innocent people they murdered.
To attain this level of murderousness, with so little awareness of it, is a shocking but truly stupendous feat of mass mind-control. If American society was to really embark on any significant course of healing, part of the process should be a US president having a very candid "chat" with the American people. In this chat, one of the first things he or she should say is, "My friends, we must face the fact that as a society, we have committed many terrible crimes, and we owe humanity an apology for these crimes. And the worst of our crimes which we must acknowledge, was what we did in Vietnam..."
by
Richard Mynick (2 articles, 3 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 1121 comments)
on Monday, February 4, 2008 at 11:29:12 AM
